I have always contested that Christian and family oriented Blockbuster went horribly and heroin-in-the-gutter out of business so quickly, not because of the advent of the internet movie sharing, but because they did not include this essential movie-viewing category. Drama? Horror? Comedy? Awkwardly-Messaged-Tween-Sexual-Exploration? All of these pale in comparison to the pure intention of this category’s delightful crap pile. Yes, these are those morsels of cinematic bliss that run the gamut of fucking eye-bleedingly terrible to bat-shit, mind-bending, David-Lynch-after-bad-seafood bemusement parks. Previous years’ have included the quintessential pillars of the filmic inebriati that are Piranha 3D, Battleship and the hook-your-car-exhaust-up-to-your-mouth-out-of-sadness-for-the-human-race Nicholas Cage’s The Wicker Man. What does this year bring? Do we drink to heighten ridiculousness? Do we douse ourselves with Jackie boy in the hope that it will offer some zen-vino-levels of clarity? Or do we simply drink to forget the abomination of taste, the societal sacrilege, of turdtacular cappitude? Let’s find out with the Movies I Will See Drunk:

The Great Gatsby

The Fitzgerald is watching you…

I think this might actually be the creme de la creme of summertime drunkitude. What better setting than the bootlegging, cocaine-swilling, gin-gobbling laggards of the roaring twenties? Ah, The Great Gatsby, the book we all know and love/despise with a burning hatred. How do we all know it? Because every fucking English curriculum from here to Zimbabwe has it as required reading. Read it or not, it’s about as hefty as a feather on a diet and can be devoured in an extended caffeine-based mania session. We all remember the quiet scenes of inward contemplation, the themes of alienation, of loss set to the backdrop of hollow revelry, all the parasites clawing at the heels of the rich in an attempt to eschew the inner sadness of their pointless lives. It’s slow. It’s literary. It’s F. Scott “He Wrote Benjamin Button?” Fitzgerald. So, who better to adapt this fiction masterpiece than a masterbator of setpieces Mr. Baz “The Hitler of Subtlety” Luhrmann, a man with more bombast than squadron of B52s filled with clones of Brian Blessed and gives us more party out back than a mullet convention. Yes, Mr. Luhrman has dazzled us (and I mean ‘dazzled’ in that I am physically dazed and mildly epileptic whenever crawling from the clutches of his silver screen outings) with his loose adaptations of Romeo + Juliet = An Awkward Next Thanksgiving, Moulin “If You Ever Wished Nicole Kidman Would Start Coughing Up Blood” Rouge!, and the film that would result if you took a lethal dose of LSD, fake tanning lotion and highlighter ink and then shoved it up Dirty Dancing’s ass: Strictly Ballroom.

Mr. Luhrmann has made a career of taking, for the most part, fairly restrained materials and pumping it with so much glitz and pizazzle that it would make one of Ke$ha’$ glitter cannons blush. Romeo + Juliet, a tragedy filled with verbal poetry that has withstood centuries of orally mangled maligning, but not without some admittedly fun moments, was suddenly transformed into a tween-serving, cross-dressing, gun-toting, Leo-fan-dribbling dance fest that turns out not-so-great. I mean…it’s fun. It ain’t Shakespeare. It’s Frank-n-Furter-speare. And don’t get me started on my vendetta against Moulin Rouge! If I could send out hitmen to murder a film with extreme prejudice, I would. I guess I’ll just have to resort to burning down the Library of Congress. Oh well.

So, this movie is an abomination. I calls ’em like I sees ’em. From the disregard for its source material to the employment of both ‘Puffy’ and ‘Dumb Accented’ Leo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, a man who looks like he is constantly baffled by the wonder of oxygen, to exploding Fitzgerald facades, to using more green screen than George Lucas did on his wedding night (let’s say, the Force wasn’t exactly ‘strong’ down there), the thing looks like a mess hotter than Tara Reid after National Crank-and-Boob-Job Appreciation Day. However, I will hold my kvetching at bay and suffer through this nonsense with a sure-to-put-me-in-the-hopsital drinking game. Rules: 1) Drink every time there’s a musical number; 2) Drink every time there’s unnecessary CGI; 3) Drink every time I confuse Leo with the Michelin Man, but with a dumb accent.

Oh dear, oh dear. This, I am sure, will be a ‘Drink to forget’ situation. As I am of around the age of 18 – 30, and since my complexion is pale and the existence of a penis lies in the positive direction, I have an affinity for zombies. This began long before it was age appropriate during a terrifying and white-knuckled play-through of the goofier-than-Tiger-Woods-with-dentures survival horror game Resident Evil 2. Since then, I have been utterly and irrationally terrified of the undead and their inevitable rise from Hell. Now, a modern psychiatrist might stock this up to my fear of social opinion and my crippling anxiety surrounding friendly backstabbing, but I say it’s because I’m a boy. Since that beautiful moment of imaginary origin, I have gobbled up zombie meal after zombie meal (it’s like a Happy Meal…except it eats you) and with it, of course, were some zombie turds. From the great and genre-defining 28 Days Later to the hollow but hilarious Zombieland to the oh-god-make-it-stop-Romero-what-are-you-doing Land of the Dead, I will take my zombies with a side helping of MORE PLEASE. Thus, when Max Brooks released his undead tour de force World War Z, I gobbled it faster than a pack of deadies stumbling on a MENSA brain storage lab. It tells the cerebral and sometimes harrowing set of stories in the wake of a near zombie apocalypse, from cradle to grave to not-grave to munching-on-your-puppy to hatchet-in-the-cranium. We have glimpses into the tales of the doctors who first discovered the outbreak, to the Jewish special forces who contained the outbreak, to families who almost froze to death in Alaska, to soldiers in the vanguard at the Battle of Yonkers. It’s a sweeping treatise on the realistic and grotesque lengths that the human race will have to resort to just to survive. Of course, in the wake of The Walking Dead and the second zombie renaissance, this thing got greenlight. It was offered one of the greatest TV writers of all time (J. Michael Strazinski, I salute you) who, apparently, gave it a script worthy of Oscar dribbling all over its undead balls.

And then purgatory. Nothing happened. Brad Pitt signed on. And nothing happened. Then the release date changed. Nothing happened. They rewrote the script to be, and I use ‘douche quotes’ here, “more action-oriented”. We all watched in horror as this victim of the hollywood succubi, teeth sunk into its arm, slowly succumbed to the evil of ‘summer movies’. Finally, the trailer slipped subtly onto the interwebs to an outcry of hatred and vitriol. Really? Flying zombies? What is this, Starship Troopers fan-fic? And why, oh why, does Brad Pritt insist on sullying my eye testicles with that Tom-Hanks-in-Castaway-crossed-with-Tom-Hanks-in-The-Da-Vinci-Code mullet? Does it require it’s own contract and extra pay? Because it seriously makes Pitt look like Three-Legged-Joe our neighborhood homeless-person-junkie-amateur-accordianist. At first the spit and the anger flew, spilling vilely across the book of Face. I could not believe that Hollywood had dragged World War Z into its dungeon and was demanding the lotion be put on the skin otherwise it gets the hose again.

But then I remembered I Am Legend. And Episode I. And The Great Gatsby. So, I decided that drink was the only escape. Rules: 1) Drink every time someone says ‘My God’. 2) Drink every time there is a ham-fisted and out-of-place reference to the book. 3) Drink every time there is an even more awkward reference to Starship Troopers. 4) Drink every time Brad Pitt needs a goddamn haircut, you hippie!

White House Down

It started like any other day, just Channing Tatum walking away from things looking ashamed for G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.

Do you remember when the first trailer of Antwon “Where Are You Even From?” Fuqua’s absurd, jingoistic and Gerard-Butler-Heavy-and-Not-in-a-Penis-Sense boner-head action movie Olympus Has Fallen? You know, that mess of a movie (I can only assume) where the North Koreans inexplicably capture the president by way of JFK Jr.-ing their plane into the Rose Garden (too soon?). Then, I guess, they capture Aaron “The Chin” Eckhart playing President Blandy McWhite-Man and of course Mr. Butler has to murder everybody. It looked dumb. It looked blowy-uppy. It looked mildly racist. You know what I thought to myself in the theater? I thought, what if the most ridiculous filmmaker allowed into the Hollywood outer rings made a completely incoherent even dumber remake, nah, response to this snorefest? Enter, Roland “Welcome to Earth” Emmerich. That’s right, the near-genius/homosexual-Citizen-Kane of blockbuster cinema, hot off his shocking un-exploding what-the-fuck-ness Shakespearean tale, Anonymous. He’s had too much time dealing with talky bullcrap like, you know, the most important Bard in western literature and his ‘art’, while arch-nemesis and homophobic frenemy Michael Bay has been rubbing his Transform-ational penis in his face.

Well, no longer must Mr. “Godzilla: The Remake” be relegated to the shadows. He must be heard, he must dazzle the world! Most likely in a sequined Speedo borrowed from Baz Luhrmann’s wardrobe for [insert any Baz Luhrmann movie here]! And so we have White House Down. How is it different? Well, EXCUSE ME! The president is BLAAAAAACK. Man, doesn’t that have some essential thematic weight? I mean, a black president? When have we ever seen that?

Oh. Deep Impact. That’s true, but, come on, that’s Morgan Freeman. That doesn’t count. He’s God. …Right and The Day After Tomorrow, that was Danny Glover. I mean, he’s no Morgan “Penguin Voice” Freeman, but he has some credibility. But there are no other movies with bla-… Well, Head of State was satire and didn’t really… Wait, we have a black president now? Since when? 2008? And I voted for him? Twice? Where the fuck have I been? Well, at least this time, Mr. Emmerich has brought some credibility to the role on Freeman-levels of excellence. (Sorry, who is playing the black president this time? …Jamie Foxx? You mean, “Stealth” Jamie Foxx? Like…Django? Oh lordie.)

Though the material looks about as original as a Che Gueverra shirt on a college freshman, this is from the gentleman who created, nay, agonizingly and lovingly birthed2012 and Stargate. I say, carry on, Emmerich! Bring us the silly! Bring us the dumb! And Channing-Tatum-size the product!

Drinking game rules: 1) Every time someone says “My God”; 2) Every time something politically impossible occurs; 3) Every time something physically impossible occurs; 4) Drink every time someone delivers a catchphrase; 5) Drink every time someone delivers a catchphrase that isn’t a catch phrase like, “Time to Die” or “Fuck you, asshole”; 6) Just drink. Like seriously, it will make it go faster.

Another one on the “Holy Shit, this Director Is Batshit Crazy” list. Neil Jordan is a director of both great skill and meager sanity. Over his twenty-something years, he has both amazed, confused and Tom Cruised us from his politically-charged and not-a-gin-drink Michael Collins and the equally Irish, but way more penis-tucked, The Crying Game to Brad Pitt/Kirsten Dunst/Cruise-tacular suck-party Interview with a Vampire. His career has been dotted with some of the more sexually confusing forays (looking at you, Breakfast on Pluto) and some really, really dumb ones (The Brave One is unofficially Jodie Foster’s coming out…but with more penises being shot off). He even created the sex/blood/anthrax orgy of scenery chewing that is The Borgias television show.

So, like Buffy Summers after months of dipping her nib in the ‘human’ inkwell, he’s back to vamps. We’ve got the delightfully buxom yet awkwardly talentless Gemma Arterton teamed up with the awkwardly not-buxom infinitely talented Saoirse “How the Fuck Do You Say That?” Ronan. The former has boobs and bathes in literal showers of gore, while the latter, Ms. Shazam Ronin, has an extenda-nail that can cut through beef like butter and…I guess drink people? Does it have a little mouth in the cuticle? Or is it the vampire equivalent of a human can-opener? Maybe she only has enough cash to afford one totally ghetto nail extension and has to save up her pocket money for the full LaTisha set? Who the fuck knows. All I know is that the trailer looks insane, Gemma Arterton is attractive and Snow Mobile Rohan is a fantastic young actress. The game is simple, drink every time you’re confused. Bring on the drunkles!

R.I.P.D.

I bet those two were fucking blazed every second of that production.

Oh Ryan Reynolds, what a rising star you once were, soaring over the heavens, a meteoric rise tailored to his chiseled abs and wry boyish grin coupled by an equally meteoroid-esque plummet through the ozone layer of Hollywood politics and the explosive reentry flames of a super hero movie more nonsensical than ballet-adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow directed by Rob Zombie. Yes, Mr. Reynolds has entered the same fame-purgatory that has clasped its Lohanian claws around the likes of Melanie Griffith, Sarah Michelle Gellar and every graduating member of SNL for the past fifteen years. Once again, studios have tapped the mercenary with a mouth but without a film franchise (oh Deadpool, will you ever come to be?) to star in Men in Black 4: This Time They’re DeadR.I.P.D., the tale of a police officer being posthumously tapped to solve undead crimes. At his side is requisite insane old man Tommy Lee Jones Jeff “A Joint a Day Keeps the Doctor Away” Bridges as a barmy old west ranger with ridiculous facial hair and a rather breasticled alter ego.

This thing will be the big, dumb, mediocre, middle-range blockbuster of the summer. Around long enough for people to see because, shit, what else are you going to do during the summer? Go outside? What do I look like? Tan? It will pass through the intestines of the America media conglomerates, unseen and untouched, a metaphoric corn kernel of unexceptionalism. It’s loud, brightly colored and thoroughly cgi-ed. It won’t push boundaries, nor will it be particularly exciting or funny. However, it has Jeff fucking Bridges and, if the Dude abides, then so do I. Obviously I need to attend this movie joint and white russian in hand and yell Cohen brothers quotes at the screen all night. Granted, this is my strategy for every Jeff Bridges movie, which made watching Seabiscuit with my grandmother very uncomfortable.

300: Rise of an Empire

Oh. And I forgot to mention the essential flagrant racism. Bring it on, nerds!

And finally, we have the proverbial cherry on the top of this booze-pie. While some of these films included on this list will cause a semi-woozy Mooney to stumble from his seat, flask flailing and spraying Knob Creek here there and everywhere, this movie might fucking kill me. Yes, because as parts of this world are plagued with famine, blood-thirsty warlords, nuclear weapons, neo-nazis, and really annoying paper cuts, God has finally answered our prayer. Was it is for more food? A reusable and clean energy source? An answer to the conflicts in the Middle East? Paper that doesn’t cause paper cuts? No. He decided to bestow upon his believers perhaps the greatest gift since Prometheus stole the fire from heaven and made a terrible fucking sci-fi movie. What is it? Why a prequel to 300 of course! Now, a sequel would be absurd. What are they going to do? Resurrect Gerard Butler by wrenching him beard first from the gravel to pit him against penis spear-weilding knob-beast intent on impaling his…well, there might be children reading. So, the studio has done one better: it has begged and pleaded Frank “Cum-for-Drains” Miller to craft another tale about the far-fetched and incredibly homosexual adventures of the Spartans.

I haven’t even seen a trailer for this movie and I’m already excited for the dangerous levels of inebriation to which I will crumble. The cast is a who’s-who of who didn’t make it. Conspicuously absent are, of course, the lovable asshole, Gerard Butler, the incomparably endowed Michael Fassbender, the sneakily British Dominic West and old Dick-in-the-Ear Zack Snyder at the helm of the HMS Testosto-licious. All of those boys and their chiseled abdominal areas have moved onto bigger and better things. From saving the president in Olympus Has Fallen to saving confident women from their feeling-good-about-themselves, Gerard Butler is a b-lister of the highest quality. Fassbender is currently frolicking in the shadow of another famously massively snaked thespian, Sir Ian McKellan. Even Snyder has overcome his obvious mental deficiencies to direct one of the obvious successes of the summer. Left, however, are the paltry remains of careers that have slipped into a Beckett-ian purgatory. Lena “The Bitch Queen Herself” Headey is doing delightfully well, but on the rest of the shortlist is David Wenham, the awkward remains of the Lord of the Rings franchise, as well as Rodrigo Santoro, whose insanely good looks have been cursed by some still-angry LOST fans, along with Eva “Light of My Sexual Life” Green, who seems to have drawn the short straw since her break out in Casino Royale.

But all of that snark aside, I am genuinely excited for 300: Rise of an Empire. What could go wrong? The only thing that leant the original any merit was Zack Snyder’s jaw-dropping visual style. So, is he directing again? Fuck no. But he sure as fuck is writing the script! That’s like getting the IBS without the delicious burrito beforehand. While I’m fairly sure that Zack Snyder’s writing skill equals that of a room of monkeys on type-writers, this trollop-party isn’t going to be as genius as the original but, I tell you, it will do one better. It will be a cheap-as-Donald-Trump-at-a-charity-auction slice of hackneyed and pointless sludge. It won’t know if it’s coming or going, throwing out boobs and nipples and abs and awkward-in-the-butt sex, every which way. And I will be there, cheering every misogynistic act of douchery, every intentionally homophobic yet unintentionally homoerotic scene of ‘brothers in arms’, every tittie and every 6-pack to fly my way. I will swim in the mediocre crud like Scrooge McDuck through his improbably large collection of gold coins. I will dance the dance of a crazed loon, sucking down my whiskey like a babe from its mother’s teet. My review will consist of solely blacked-out non-syllables, sloshily slapped across the keyboard at 2am. Will I give into thematic continuity use my penis instead of my numbed fingers? Only drunk Andrew will know. And who can predict that glorious maniac?

There shall be no drinking rules. 300 might attempt to praise Aries and Athena, the gods of war, but the only deity present will be that drunk delight, Dionysus. Together we shall tumble, Daniels in hand, into the waters of Lethe to cleanse us both of the fact that we just watched a fucking PREQUEL to 300. Never before have I been convinced that God was dead until this moment. Or the second half of Prometheus. That sucked.